What is the name of this blog? Part 2.

My reaction to "iced zen"is...I can't quite visualize it...

...but that's what brainstorming's all about.  We are coming up, soon, on the 10th anniversary of this project.  The date will be August 29, 2013, and it seems compulsory to me that we take a day off, rent out a disused storefront performance space in the Haight or Spenard, set up a projector and an espresso machine, and read posts to ourselves and selected guests until our nurses track us down and take us back to the Home.

Eisengeiste was originally a reference to Ironminds, which, like almost all things I like, was shut down with almost unseemly haste.  An account of the original (two-minute) naming process appears in these two posts, and the subsequent disputes among the members on details of German grammar remain a matter of public record.  To further complicate matters, the word eisengeiste does appear in German books - well, ONE German book I found, which sort of undercuts the argument that it's not really German.

Other meanings have emerged after the fact.  For example, I enjoy the near-pun on eisegete, a person who projects their own views onto everything they read.  It also turns out that there are lots of Eisens to think about, like photographer Evvy Eisen, and ukiyoe-e print maker Keisai Eisen (渓斎 英泉), not to mention the bald guy who oversaw Operation Overlord.

There are more to track down:

• There was apparently someone either acquainted with or (more likely) invented by Peter Ustinov named Natalia Lvovna von Eisengeist.
• There is an EisenGeist kennel in Tacoma.
• There is a comic book ghost of a steampunk robot named Eisengeist.

As we look forward to the future and treasure our 92719 ranking on Technorati, I do think it is time to reflect back on our accomplishments.  It's one thing to put up a blog on a summer's day in 2003 - but another thing entirely to stay with it as a group for a decade.  

I believe Plato had some thoughts that might be useful in this connection.  I believe that, rather than know it, because I've never read Plato and I copied and pasted the following quote from the Internet.  That said, I think the sentiment fits:

Even during the period for which any living being is said to live and retain his identity - as a man, for example, is called the same man from boyhood to old age - he does not in fact retain the same attributes, although he is called the same person: he is always becoming a new being and undergoing a process of loss and reparation, which affects his hair, his flesh, his bones, his blood and his whole body. And not only his body, but his soul as well. No man's character, habits, opinions desires pleasures pains and fears remain always the same: new ones come into existence and old ones disappear.

So then, as we approach our momentous anniversary, shall we, Pepys-like, finish our project and move on?  Or, having outlasted millions of bloggers who discovered better uses for their time, shall we stir the embers and make ready for another decade, and once more tilt at windmills, Republicans, and each other over matters of consuming importance only to people like us?